If you have opened a new barbershop or already have one in operation and are wondering what to do next to attract more customers to your barbershop, then this article on barbershop advertising will be of immense help to you. Most barber/salon businesses devote time for handling the operational aspects of their business while neglecting or paying insufficient focus on their barbershop marketing due to which their client base remains more or less static or has very slow growth. With growing competition affecting the revenues of almost all sectors, you can attract more customers to your barbershop consistently if you utilize online and offline barbershop marketing ideas.
Out of online and offline marketing methods for advertising a barbershop, online marketing is much better as it takes less budget and has very good targeting options due to which you can easily analyze and scale the marketing. Let us explore all the barbershop promotion ideas one by one.
1) Well Designed Website
A website is your second shop with much more facilities than your physical barbershop. By having a website, you can attend to 100’s of visitors (potential clients) without being bothered by space and time restrictions, unlike your physical barbershop. This digital asset (website) can supply you with much more clients than you can handle if you know how to use it. It will be required in other online marketing strategies too, so we have listed a well-designed website as the first factor. Your barbershop oriented website must have the features given below
A) Must be professional-looking, easy to navigate and properly organized.
B) Must adjust on mobile devices too i.e. must be mobile-friendly as a growing number of visitors use mobile phones to access the web.
C) Must load quickly as people have short attention spans and they will move the back button of their browser if the website doesn’t load quickly.
D) Must have testimonials on the main page to boost conversions.
E) Must have a direct appointment booking option on the main page to enhance sales.
F) Must have a contact number in big font readily visible on the main homepage itself.
You can also add a direct live chat plugin to enable the visitors to connect directly.
2) Hit the Right Search Spot in Google
While it is very common for Google to retrieve 1000’s of results for any keyword typed by any user online, only the first-page ranking sites get the major attention. So unless your barbershop website makes it to the first page, it will fail to catch most of the potential customers who search for barbershops on Google. To tackle this, you need constant adaptation to the changing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) trends. For this, you must hire an SEO agency that is proven to show good results within a few months.
3) Hit the Right Spot in Local Listings
The Google local business listings are a great way for local businesses to get more exposure and clients. But there are only 3 spots in the local listing while the competing sites are many. So whenever anyone types “barbershop near me” in Google, your website and business details (phone number, address, reviews, etc) must show up in the local listing. This can be done by paying heed to the SEO requirements of Google local listing which are slightly different than normal SEO done for organic rankings. It requires citations, reviews, data consistency, proximity to the location, etc to trigger good placement.
To make things better, you can also make a Google appointment booking facility available so that people can directly book your services from the search engine interface itself. Your digital marketing agency can take care of the website ranking aspect if they are well versed in GMB (Google My Business) ranking and optimization.
4) The Press Release Mania
Press releases are simply great for promoting your barbershop online. You might have seen press releases issued by many companies online but do you know the reason? Apart from making formal announcements, they are utilized to get traffic and backlinks to the linked sites. They also help to establish the brand identity of a business, person, or service.
Once you write up a press release for your barbershop and choose the right distribution partner for getting it published, you are sure to land 200+ placements across various small and big sites due to which your site will witness a spike in links and traffic. This can also lead to voluntary pick up of your content on many other niche sites too. So marketing your barbershop through press releases has multi-pronged benefits.
5) Getting Quick Results With Ads
Since search engine optimization (SEO) takes some time to show results (2-3 months), advertising your barbershop through paid ads can show good results quickly (provided you create the ad campaign well). To get the most active leads, the best platform is Google Ads. The only downside is that it is costly and competitive and if you don’t create an optimized ad campaign with the right targeting, you may spend more money on ads than the overall return that you generate from it. So either learn the basics of Google Ads or get the task handled by any marketing agency.
6) Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing for your barbershop can allow your business to gain recognition in your local area due to which you may see a constant rise in the number of clients served by you. The most basic thing that you must keep in mind while doing SMM (Social media marketing) for your barbershop business is that it is a slow and consistent process as people on social media don’t welcome aggressive marketing. You can start with sharing good content and making connections during the initial phase. After gathering a big enough following in a few months, you can get many recurring clients from the same set of audience generated by you through your social network profiles.
7) Video Marketing
For convincing and motivating a person to buy a product/service, videos tend to be much better than text. Having your professional videos on Youtube will not only enable a person to learn more about your service but will also provide leads/customers for your barbershop/salon. As a creative marketing method, you can post videos of funny hairstyles or hairstyles of celebrities (done by you) on some emerging platforms like TikTok to create a massive awareness of your business. By embedding videos on your own website, the conversion rate is sure to shoot up.
8) Email Marketing
Only a fraction of people who come across your website will actually convert to sales/customers. This is because people have many options online and they surf many sites to finally select one of them. To increase the proportion of visitors into customers, you can capture the email address of visitors so as to establish a solid line of communication through which you can send your marketing messages. You can give away some relevant e-books (like hair growth tips, hair care tips) or offer them in exchange for an email address. You can also do this process for your current customers by collecting their email addresses and sending them new offers/discounts periodically.
9) Content Marketing
There are many low-traffic-oriented keywords that are usually neglected by big firms and SEO agencies. You can create content around local low-traffic keywords to get more organic visitors (and sales) per month. Examples of such keywords can be “best celebrity style barbershop in [location]”, “best beard trimming services in [location]”, etc. After getting a good volume of such articles, you will start seeing traffic pouring to your site passively which will level up your sales and revenue. Content marketing can also be done by utilizing other high authority sites where you can guest post to get traffic and backlinks.
10) Related Services
You can capture more range of clients by adding related services like hair coloring, massage, beauty-oriented services, etc. You can hire more specialized employees in different but related fields to increase footfalls to your shop.
11) Subscriptions
To increase the revenue per client and to make him loyal to your shop, you can come up with subscriptions plans that can give certain benefits to the customers. By having a range of packages and subscriptions, the overall revenue will increase. You can also get creative in making bigger subscription plans like a family pack, friend pack, where a person will get rewards/incentives to bring their family members/friends to your barbershop.
12) Instagram Marketing
Instagram is a visual social network and unique images get many shares and love from its audience. Sharing images of new haircuts and even funny haircuts can instill momentum for your images and shop. It is obvious that you must take permission from your customer to share the images. You can also design and offer theme-based haircuts for different events like FIFA, Soccer, Valentines’ Day, etc to get more exposure and visibility to your business.
13) Directories
All such sites/platforms that rank high in Google for many local terms are the best targets for your business. Make accounts on all such high authority sites like Yelp, MyLocalBarber, BeautySeeker, NextDoor, Crunchbase, etc. It will take just a few minutes of your time to mark your business presence on each of these sites but it will open up a new lead generation medium for your business.
14) Fan Style Haircutting and Seminars
What looks different gets noticed. A creative way to advertise your barbershop business is to come up with a menu card of celebrity-styled hair cuts. By having something unique in your business, you stand far better chances of getting noticed. You can make the hair-cutting menu card for various top celebrities and personalities like Ronaldo, Arnold, etc. You can also hold seminars and can invite professional people to give tips on hair care, beauty, etc while promoting your barbershop to attendees.
15) Discounts
You can play with various discounts on offering combo services like hair and massage, hair + massage + coloring, etc. You can also collect the phone numbers and email addresses of customers and can announce these discounts through email/SMS to customers who take your services.
16) Referrals
To inspire people to bring more of their friends and family members to your shop, you can start a referral program where the referring person will get some or the other advantages for bringing new clients. Generating referrals is a powerful word-of-mouth advertising technique for a barbershop that is sure to boost your sales.
17) Influencers
You can give free haircuts or other services to prominent social media influencers from your location with the condition that they would vouch for your business on their social media profiles so that both parties would get benefits.
18) Photo Sharing
To attract more customers to your barbershop, encourage your customers to leave feedback, photos of your service on their social media profiles so that your business can get more attention and awareness. You can devise various incentives to get the social sharing done by your customers.
19) News Articles
You can create and contribute interesting content related to hairstyles and other topics relevant to your business on local newspapers and online news sites so that you can establish the brand image of your personality as well as your business. There are many emerging news sites that are always in the search of unique and interesting content and you can gain an advantage by reaching out to such sites and offering your content for free.
20) Local Events
Communicating directly is more impactful than conveying messages through advertising your barbershop online. This is why you must actively participate in all such occasions where you can mingle with the local community. Apart from attending, you can also enlarge your marketing efforts by becoming a co-sponsor for events or by donating to a local cause.
21) Merchandise
You can order custom printed and low-cost merchandise in bulk like pens, mugs, etc and can give it away to your customers. This will ensure that your customer will remember your business name and will become much more likely to visit you again along with referring you. You can make it much more exciting by giving low-cost custom printed merchandise to kids.
22) SMS Marketing
By sending SMS messages to people in your location, you will ensure that more people become aware of your new discounts/offers/updates regularly. You can do this in two ways. First is by collecting the phone numbers of your present customers and second is by taking the services of any SMS marketing company that has a ready database of numbers by city location.
23) Traditional Offline Marketing
Ads on newspapers, billboards, banners, flyers, etc are the most familiar offline marketing methods for a barbershop that you can employ to get more attention. Though they are costly and have fewer targeting options, they have their own advantage of reaching out to people who are not tech-savvy.
We hope that this list of barbershop marketing ideas will give you several inputs to grow clients for your barbershop. For discussion or doubts, please do comment below.
